Today I’m writing to announce several new and exciting initiatives within the Liferay Community. We consider this to be the starting point for a completely revamped community experience. We also have other changes in the works and can’t wait to share the details of what we have been working on. Read on for more details and let us know what you think.

Advocates

Our first initiative is to create a new team of Developer Advocates to reassure our commitment with the community. Their mission is to inspire, educate, assist and encourage our community to build amazing applications using Liferay open source technology. We believe it’s important to have a dedicated group of people that can listen to you and take action.

This doesn’t mean that they are now the only ones responsible for the community. For us to have a healthy and vibrant ecosystem, we need everybody to have a sense of ownership, we need everybody to care. But the Advocates will make sure the “wheels are greased” to keep things in the community moving forward.

New Home

We want to revamp the overall community experience and we’re starting it by announcing a completely new site for the community!

The old Community Home page was primarily focused on Liferay Portal, but Liferay has now grown to support several open source projects (and communities), like Sennajs, Metal, and Electric. Our new Community Home will help you discover new Liferay open source projects, stay connected to important announcements, and get in touch with other community members. This a new beginning with huge potential to grow.

Chat

Today, there are pretty much two main channels that community members use to communicate. Technical questions are often asked on the Forums. Stories and tutorials are often written on the Blogs.

Those places are great and serve their purposes really well, but we kind of miss a more instant channel. Because of that, we’re introducing a new chat that will allow people to communicate in a quick and direct way.

Chat will foster ongoing conversations among community members, help us feel closer together, and let you answer quick questions for each other.

Forums

Our forums have always been a good place for people to ask questions and get answers. As of today, we’ve seen more than 363,100 posts from 33,296 different participants over there.

Although those numbers can show how vibrant this community is, we know we can do better, especially when it comes to the number of unanswered questions.

In order to identify opportunities and drive more engagement on our forums, we signed a contract with Network Activator. Their tool allow us to list experts in each area and automatically assign questions to them.

Before Network Activator we had an average of 30 unanswered questions/week. After, we had an average of 10-15 unanswered questions/week. This 67% reduction is great, but need to decrease it even more.

We’re even thinking about how to identify experts in the community so you can help us answer questions, too. Your participation is crucial for this to work. Keep asking, keep answering!

Bug Reporting

As you may know, many of our projects use Jira for issue tracking. Recently, we upgraded our self-hosted Jira instance from 6.4.10 to 7.3.3. It may not sound very interesting, but this update comes with several improvements that will be useful for bug reporters, including a better experience for editing issue descriptions.

We have also created a new Community Dashboard that will summarize how we are doing responding to Community bug reports.

Besides that, our product management team has grown in the last year. That means more people resposible to filter what is being reported and taking action. They are identifying bugs reported by the community and prioritizing them. Last week, for example, 13 bugs were reported by community members, and now only 5 of them remain open.

Code Contributions

Modularity has been a very important topic to us for many reasons. By splitting our code into small pieces we think there's a lot of potential for increasing open source participation in Liferay by lowering the barrier to entry for new contributors.

In addition, we’re currently evaluating the contribution process for all our open source projects. We've already identified opportunities for improvements, from documenting core development to signing the contributor's agreement, and we'll announce these changes in the near future.

User Groups

One of the most exciting parts of belonging to a community is meeting other members in person. In fact, we believe that personal contact is the richest experience, not matched by any media or technology. That's why we like user groups so much.

Today, there are more than 44 Liferay user groups in 32 different countries, but not all of them are active.

In the next couple weeks, we’ll reach out to organizers to see how we can help their groups to be up and running. If they can’t find places to meet, we could help. If they can’t find speakers, we could help. If there’s anything that you need as a user group organizer or if you want to become one, please let us know.

Conferences Worldwide

Liferay conferences are a great way to network with other community members from all around the globe. They also provide an excellent way to meet with Liferay engineers and experts face to face to ask questions and provide direct feedback on your projects.

This year we’re continuing with our three core conference formats: LDSF is primarily for business or “digital transformation” audiences, DevCon is deeply technical, and Symposium is a healthy mix of both.

All conferences are an excellent opportunity to learn about upcoming new features and to learn best practices to help your projects be successful. We’ll be in 11 different countries this year so I hope to see you there!

Special Activities

In the past we launched several special activities like BugSquad, Liferay Ideas, Community Expedition, Top Contributors, Community Pulse Awards, Official User Groups, and Community Verifiers.

Those initiatives helped with engagement and provided some clear guidelines for participating within the Liferay community.

We’ll be reviving some of these programs, which were crucial in improving product quality, building relationships, and recognizing and rewarding our community's talent.

Clustering

On a very pragmatic note, we are working on a new clustering module for Liferay Portal Community Edition. After speaking with many of you throughout the last 14 months, we came to the conclusion that we can find a way to meet the clustering needs of the community and still address the issues that originally led to our decision to ship Liferay Portal Community Edition without clustering. Please stay tuned for more details regarding this!

Conclusion

We’ll continue to do our best to understand your needs, see how the market responds, and make adjustments as necessary. We are taking seriously our commitment to invest our success back in our community, and excited to do much more.

Today I’m writing to announce that we are discontinuing support for Liferay Connected Services and Audience Targeting for Liferay Portal 7 Community. The main factor behind the decision was the lack of community adoption for both offerings.

Regarding Audience Targeting, there was low adoption by community members compared with most other Marketplace Plug-Ins. Surprisingly, Audience Targeting actually had more interest from Enterprise Subscribers, as you can see by the number of downloads here:

While our Community is an order of magnitude larger than our Subscriber base, the enterprise version of Audience Targeting as of today has 2567 downloads compared with 1951 downloads for the community version. We take that as a sign that most community members aren’t as interested in the functionality provided by the plug-in, which is usually used for Digital Marketing scenarios.

A similar train of thought holds true for Liferay Connected Services, a cloud-based set of tools for monitoring Liferay systems in production and applying patches and updates. After holding a public beta for over a year, we saw almost 3x uptake by enterprise users vs. community users:

Focusing on a single version of both products will also allow us to evolve Audience Targeting and LCS more quickly into mature products. When targeting and LCS become more feature-rich, we may re-visit the offerings and packaging them in a way that’s attractive to the community.

I’ve made two announcements in a row now that are negative from the Community's perspective and it probably looks like Liferay is moving away from our commitment to open source. But our focused approach to targeting and LCS will also free up resources for us to invest in other things that are more valuable to the community in the short term. We have been thinking about Community a lot here at Liferay and I’ll soon be announcing some of the ways we want to invest more in all of you and improve your overall experience with Liferay, so stay tuned.

The internet has changed the way we live because it gives everyone an equal voice in a global conversation. No matter who you are or where you live, you can make yourself heard, whether by contributing to Wikipedia, creating a video that goes viral on social media, or corresponding personally with people and organizations around the world.

And yet it still seems like so much shouting is going on, and not enough listening. One of the areas we see this is with companies and how they interact with their customers.

As companies, we have a bigger opportunity than ever before to hear our customers—to understand the problems they face, and give them the right solution to make their lives easier. That might be your next great product, but it might also be a simple phone call or email giving them some advice or help.

Unfortunately, too many companies today are overloading their customers with emails, offers, and content that reflect the company’s priorities rather than meeting the customer’s needs. These companies see digital technology as just another channel through which to talk at their customers.

That’s why we are happy to announce today the launch of Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP). With Liferay DXP, we asked ourselves, “How can we help companies do a better job of listening?” Liferay DXP helps your customers have a conversation with you, to make their needs heard and give you a chance to meet them.

It’s also important for the customer’s feedback to make an impact on your actual business operations. Liferay DXP isn’t just about surface level interactions. With our portal heritage, we’re able to integrate those interactions into your business operations, updating customer records, getting workflows going, and sending up-to-date information back to the customer.

And finally, in a world where customer data is increasingly being treated as a commodity to monetize, Liferay DXP seeks to give companies the tools needed to handle their customer’s data securely and sensitively. We want to encourage properly handling and processing data in a way that’s right by the customer.

Over the past 15 years, Liferay has been trying to find ways to make technology work better for people. As an open source company, we made sure the software we built met the needs of real users and customers. As a portal provider, we did this by matching people to the content and applications that suited their role in an organization. And while making things friendly and easy for regular people, we also made sure to adhere to the stringent security requirements of our toughest customers.

We see Liferay Digital Experience Platform as the next logical step in our evolution as a company, and I hope that we’ve done a good job listening to your needs as we’ve designed our product.

Today I’d like to let you know that Liferay Portal 7 Community does not have "out of the box" support for clustering, non-open source app servers (Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere), and non-open source databases (Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase DB). Support for these non-open source systems will be found in Liferay's current and future commercial releases, which are available by Subscription, or you can develop your own OSGi module independently to support these features.

It’s a huge decision and we think it may raise concerns from some community members, so we want to be upfront and explain our thinking. Why are we doing this?

With this decision, we hope to maximize the success people have with Liferay in production.

Here’s an outline of a common situation that leads to a bad Liferay experience for companies:

A systems integrator (SI) hired by a company to build a solution makes a proposal that includes Liferay CE. The SI provides an all-inclusive service including new development, configuration and customization of Liferay, deployment, and support of the solution.

The solution proposed is built on Liferay CE, but the SI makes no mention of Liferay or our subscription offering. This prevents the company from knowing they can have a formal relationship with Liferay as the software vendor.

The SI sometimes does many things that lead to a poor experience, including:

re-implement features from scratch because they haven’t invested enough time into deeply understanding what’s available out of the box with Liferay. This makes their customers (who aren’t familiar with Liferay) pay the SI more than they need to for the solution. It also means those custom features may not work as well with the rest of the Liferay platform.

charge their customers for one-off support and maintenance of the project. SIs don’t have the same scale of customers that Liferay does, they don’t have as many fixes, and the support costs they charge their customer aren’t shared across multiple installations. So those companies pay more for less coverage of defects and improvements.

implement Liferay with non-standard practices or customize the code in non-standard ways, leading to unstable projects and a poor experience. This also makes it difficult or impossible to use standard apps from the Marketplace and to upgrade.

The net effect is that many companies have a bad experience with Liferay, and this hurts the Liferay eco-system: our community, partners, and our company. These companies usually don’t know that having a Liferay subscription is an option; they don’t know that the SIs aren’t following best practices; and they don’t know about all the standard features they’re missing out on. We think companies should have the chance to consider a relationship with the Liferay eco-system and make an informed decision whether they will use our community or commercial offerings. So by removing the compatibility and features that are essential for business-critical deployments, we are (in a brute force sort of way) making companies aware that a better option (for most) is available.

Now, when discussing this decision internally, some of us at Liferay rightly raised that this might be an annoyance to the community who now have to go build their own modules, and that SIs will just build their own connectors anyway to the goal wouldn’t be achieved. Meanwhile, we may lose potential community members, for example non-profit organizations that received Oracle licenses for free but want to use Liferay open source. Companies who would have tried Liferay Community on their proprietary infrastructure for a POC and then contacted sales later, now may never do so.

Those supporting the change said there isn’t enough incentive for these SIs to become contributing community members. Taking out commercial infrastructure and clustering support is one step in encouraging the SIs learn how to develop Liferay modules. They also feel that companies who can afford integrator services and proprietary infrastructure should pay for Liferay. Not doing more to monetize these companies is a disservice to the hard work of our community.

While we can’t know with certainty whether the net effect will be negative or positive, we’d like to go forward with the change and bring about a conversation. We want to understand who uses Liferay Portal Community on proprietary infrastructure without taking the Subscription. As they share their stories, we’ll better understand their needs and evolve our mix of free and commercial technologies and services to better meet the needs of all our users.

Of course we also want to see whether this decision does indeed help more companies to know our Enterprise subscription exists and to take an informed decision on engaging with Liferay.

I’m sure some of you will disagree with this change, whether for idealistic (FOSS) or pragmatic reasons (I can’t afford a Subscription). I know this isn’t the ideal solution for the problem. And you may feel that Liferay is unjustly burdening the community with our business issues.

So we want to do as much as we can to limit the effects of this change only to those who aren’t giving back. If you’ve been an active member of our community, or you really have a constrained budget but need to use Liferay with proprietary software, or you’re an existing customer putting together a POC for your upgrade, we can make exceptions and provide connectors privately.

One of my team members, who is very passionate about Liferay and about the community, voiced his disagreement, saying, “we (Liferay) are increasing our sales. I mean, I could understand these decisions if Liferay is going down.”

And it’s true that Liferay is profitable and increasing our sales, but to me it’s also a matter of principle. I want Liferay (the community and company) to decide how to distribute value from what we’ve built, not a random third party. Sure, it’s great that some companies are getting good open source software, and that SIs are getting a lot of value out of our software, but we should have some influence on the allocation of that value.

I also want to invest more back into Liferay. In 2010, we were very worried about how changing the license from MIT to LGPL would impact the community. That decision had its share of dissenters and supporters, both among our employees and in the community once it was announced. But what we heard more than anything else was that people wanted Liferay to invest more in our community. Pay attention to our contributions. Moderate our forums. Give us a way to vote on features.

We also launched our Marketplace, which now has over 512 Apps, 1,500 Registered Developers, 482,896 Downloads, and has allowed community members to sell their Apps and get recognition for their work.

From DevCon and Symposiums around the world, to our documentation team and dev.liferay.com, to more open source projects like AlloyEditor and Metal.js, we are taking seriously our commitment to invest our success back in our community, and excited to do much more. Unlike other open source companies, we have zero outside investors to answer to, so we can invest in our community on our own terms.

What’s next?

Like I said, we want this to be a conversation. So if you’ll trust us with this decision, we’ll continue to do our best to understand your needs, see how the market responds, and make adjustments as necessary.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of ideas in the works for the Liferay community. We are already looking for a new Community Manager to replace James Falkner (feel free to apply—job posting here), and we’re establishing a new Community Action Team to provide additional support to the Community Manager. We’d like to establish a formal onboarding process to help new community members get up to speed quickly. And we’ve been working with Bitergia to understand where our community needs more attention.

With Liferay Portal 7 Community now available, I hope you will see that your investment and dedication to Liferay is worthwhile. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Questions

If it's pluggable, can I plug in my own implementation in CE?

Yes! Indeed, it is possible to provide "DIY" support for clustering and your commercial infrastructure (or any other database/app server/clustering technology). People have been doing this for years for other systems (think Siebel, Salesforce.com, Endeca). With Liferay 7, it's even easier thanks to modularity and OSGi. For databases, check out https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-61156 which extracts FOSS support into modules, and implement your own in this pattern. For app servers, check out the DeploymentExtension class, and implement your own subclass for your chosen app server.

Tell me more about clustering?

Although it is technically possible to cluster previous versions of Liferay CE (like 6.2), it has always suffered from scalability problems because its cache replication technique is not tuned at all, and it is up to you to tune it (and support it) for CE. So it wasn't that useful out of the box, and most people that used it were doing so through an enterprise subscription anyway (which included plugins to enhance clustering and support for configuration of a cluster). Clustering has been modularized and abstracted in 7, and now the "out of the box" distribution includes a boilerplate implementation module provided (via https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-61123). If you need scalable, highly available Liferay because you are supporting thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, and your business or state depends on it, you will need to implement this (along with the other clustering configuration that you've always needed to do for your database, app server, load balancer, document store, etc).

The latest Magic Quadrant report from Gartner on the Horizontal Portal market has just been released, and you can find it here on our website. I just read it through and here’s what I noticed.

A Market Transformed

First, the report opens with a strong statement on how much the portal market has changed:

“The past five years has witnessed a massive transformation of the market for horizontal portals… While the renewed portal market retains many of the principles, practices and value propositions of the old, the modern portal market has been transformed almost beyond recognition.”

In other words, the value portals seek to provide are very similar to what they promised before—personalization, unifying interactions with several systems (aggregation or integration), and a great user experience—but the way they are being achieved is completely different, reinvigorating and transforming the market as a result.

I tend to agree with Gartner’s assertions here: the last five years has seen a huge shift in attitude toward portals, and I think Liferay has had a part to play in that. One customer told us that when he tells his colleagues about Liferay, he says, “Liferay is the portal you want to use when you don’t want to use a ‘portal.’” I think he means that Liferay is a modern portal that gives you results with fresh technology, unlike the old-fashioned portals of the last decade.

Of course, we’re not the only ones. Several portal vendors have embraced a lot of new technical and market developments to make this change in attitude possible:

The convergence of mobile, social, cloud and data

The increasing importance of user experience

The proliferation of mobile apps

Machine- & analytics-based personalization

Here’s a brief chart showing the new technologies modern portals are using to deliver these important benefits:

Benefit

How the benefit was achieved

Old-fashioned portals

Modern portals

Personalization

Roles (Managers see x, team members see y)

Rules Engines

Custom user pages

Content targeting

Location awareness

Machine learning / big data

Unifying Interactions

Aggregated interfaces (portlets, link directories)

Single sign-on

Integration

Multi-channel/ omni-channel interaction

Single User Profile & History

Cloud-based synchronization

User Experience

Single Portal

Themes

Mobile friendliness

Native mobile apps

Cross-channel continuity

Modern interfaces

UX guidelines

There’s a lot of innovation happening in this market, and we’re just getting started.

The Competitive Landscape

Movement among WCM Vendors

Given how dynamic the portal market has become, it’s natural to see fresh competition, with different vendors taking different approaches to the portal value proposition, including some WCM vendors. In fact, Gartner believes (and we agree) that the portal and WCM markets are converging toward a new market Gartner is calling “user experience platforms” (UXP).

To that end, last year, Gartner included a good number of WCM vendors in the portal report, but for 2015, Gartner scaled back the number of WCM vendors in this report to those that 1) customers ask about in portal scenarios and 2) have built features that give their WCMs portal-like capabilities.

So five WCM vendors remain in 2015: EPiServer (Ektron), Sitecore and Squiz, added in 2014, and Drupal and Adobe from past years.

Leaders: The usual suspects

Meanwhile, the Leaders quadrant is populated exclusively by long-standing portal vendors, except Salesforce, the SaaS giant, which joined the Leaders for the first time this year. Several Leaders lost ground, including Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

On the completeness of vision scale, we are second only to IBM and slightly ahead of Adobe. Backbase has also dropped back on the vision scale, to fourth place.

Overall, Liferay seems to have done reasonably well, losing a little ground on completeness of vision but improving significantly on Ability to Execute. IBM beats us slightly on both counts, but our offerings are so different that it’s feasible to say we are Leaders in our respective approaches, with Liferay going for a “lean, but complete, UXP” approach, and IBM giving you everything including the kitchen sink, which might add unnecessary complexity and cost to all but the largest portal scenarios.

Here are all the vendors ranked by each of the two scales (top to bottom or right to left, with ties going to the vendor ranking higher on the other scale):

Ability to Execute

Completeness of Vision

1

IBM

IBM

2

Liferay

Liferay

3

Microsoft

Adobe

4

Oracle

Backbase

5

SAP

SAP

6

Sitecore

Oracle

7

Drupal

Salesforce

8

Salesforce

Microsoft

9

EPiServer

Sitecore

10

Adobe

EPiServer

11

OpenText

Squiz

12

Backbase

OpenText

13

Squiz

Drupal

Fit for many different purposes

Looking through the comments, Gartner indicates that certain vendors are more suited for specific scenarios than for others. Here’s a summary of how I interpreted their comments:

LEGEND:

✓ positive mention

— neutral, or positive & negative mention

✕ negative mention

Digital Marketing / Public Websites

Customer Service / Customer Portals

Employees / Intranets

Integration

Adobe

✓

✕

✕

✕

Backbase

✓

✓

✕

✕

Drupal

✓

—

no mention

—

EPiServer

no mention

✓

✕

no mention

IBM

no mention

✓

✓

✓

Liferay*

40%

40%

30%

60%

Microsoft

✕

✕

✓

—

OpenText

✓

✓

no mention

no mention

Oracle

no mention

✓

no mention

✓

Salesforce

✓

✓

no mention

✓–

SAP

✕

no mention

✕

✕

Sitecore

✓

✕

✕

✓

Squiz

✓

✓

✕

no mention

* For Liferay, since Gartner didn’t speak to specific strengths and weakness for various scenarios, we are instead listing the rough percentage of customers that use Liferay for different scenarios. Many customers use Liferay for more than one scenario, which explains why the numbers don’t add up to 100%.

What did I learn from the report?

Liferay is doing well

The 2015 Magic Quadrant is a great validation of what we’ve been able to achieve here at Liferay, and we’re proud of the following points we gleaned from the report:

Gartner’s review of Liferay indicates that the market sees us as a stable, viable, and competitive vendor in this landscape.

Liferay is squarely in leadership of this market along with IBM.

With Red Hat’s departure, we are the only commercial open source portal vendor in the report.

Customers can be assured that top tier global systems integrators are available to assist with their Liferay deployments.

Our ecosystem enjoys all the benefits that come with using a product from a fast-growing, innovative vendor.

We’re moving toward Digital Experiences

The other takeaway for me is that Liferay is heading in the right direction as we move toward expanding our technology to support digital experiences. Our market is modernizing to meet the demands of more sophisticated use cases.

It’s naïve to think that customers are going to come to a single website or portal to connect with you. Digital interactions will happen in more places than ever, within and outside your control. They may be fleeting, transactional, one-time experiences that nevertheless hugely impact the customer’s perception of your company.

Unifying experiences no longer means forcing everyone through one box; it means having a platform that can tie together a multitude of interactions into a single understanding of your customer relationship.

We have a lot to be thankful for

Liferay still has so much we want to develop to support these needs, but we’re greatly encouraged that the foundation we’ve built is the right one so far. To our customers, partners, and community: thank you for all of your support that has made our acknowledgement in this report possible!

If you haven’t heard the news yet, Liferay has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for the fifth year in a row, and we’ve placed second only to IBM—and well ahead of SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. We’re really excited about our placement in this year’s report, and so are our partners and customers. At our annual user conference, many people shared that the report validates the choice they made to commit to the Liferay platform for their portal and website initiatives.

You can check out the report here. Here are some thoughts on the broader report and what it says about the market.

Why WCM Vendors? It’s all about Customer Experience

First, the inclusion of WCM vendors and the emphasis on digital marketing in some vendor offerings points to the overall trend toward personalized online experiences. Nobody thinks of websites, customer portals, and mobile experiences as just channels for pushing out information anymore. Customers expect to interact with companies through these channels, and that’s a huge opportunity for companies to listen to what they’re saying—and respond.

But the heritage of WCMs is to push information to people, so WCM vendors have needed to add in portal-like capabilities to make content relevant to a person’s context. WCM vendors will continue to try to retrofit portal capabilities to strengthen their ability to deliver content in context, but it’s a lot harder as an afterthought, and without a credible solution for enterprise integration, WCM-based experiences will be limited to the content in their repository.

As portal vendors like Liferay steadily round out their own content management offerings with content targeting and analytics, we’ll be able to meet digital marketing and customer service needs with websites and portals that provide rich experiences enhanced by information from ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems.

More importantly, portal vendors like Liferay are uniquely suited to address the entire customer lifecycle, from prospect to close to customer service. A lot of WCM vendors have completely different approaches to a user when they’re anonymous vs. logged in; Liferay’s vision is to have continuity across both anonymous (traditionally WCM/digital marketing) and logged-in (traditionally portal/customer service) experiences. In a world full of information noise, companies that streamline experiences to save customers time and frustration will win their loyalty.

Liferay: the Lean UXP

Gartner also comments on the trend toward UXPs and Lean Portals, noting that Liferay is more on the lean side of the house and is favored by technical people. That analysis works for now—our goal at Liferay is ultimately to be a “Lean UXP” that incorporates everything you need to create and manage rich multi-channel experiences without the bloat of “full UXP” platforms, which can add too much cost and complexity. On the other hand, the problem with just being “lean” is you can end up skimpy. “Lightweight” portal vendors don’t always have a story for the long haul. What do you do after you build that snazzy website with a great UI but no deep integration? Can you add more robust elements like order fulfillment, inventory control or issue resolution that require talking to systems of record?

But if the lean vendors have gotten one thing right, it’s that portlets and the traditional boxy portal are definitely not the right paradigm anymore for delivering great online experiences. So at Liferay we’ve been building a lot of great stuff for our next release that embraces the trend toward mobile, internet-enabled devices, and independent web applications built on Javascript frameworks. And we’re also responding to business needs like Digital Marketing and Customer Experience Management with features like Audience Targeting that take us well into UXP territory.

The Trio of Portal Use Cases

Finally, the report rounds out its market analysis with mention of the Social Intranet as a core focus of many portal vendors. It used to be that the employee intranet was a vehicle for downward communication—messages from executive management and company announcements, for example—or for individual transactions like employee onboarding and benefits enrollment. But now we realize that we’ve been missing the voice of the employee, and making our intranets social and collaborative brings that missing voice into the picture.

Gartner thus reaffirms the core use cases of the portal: public websites (Digital Marketing), service portals (Customer Experience), and employee intranets (Productivity and Knowledge). What all three have in common is that they rely on knowing who your users are and what they need, and they benefit from connecting people with systems and other people to accomplish a goal—and those are the things portals have always tried to do well.

What's Different This Year?

You may be curious how the 2014 report differs from 2013. New this year in the inclusion criteria that Gartner used to select vendors for the MQ is “search and navigation,” described by Gartner as a function that allows end users and portal administrators to find and discover content and services available through the portal. In addition, vendors must now support clients in more than two industry verticals, adding on to the requirement last year for more than one industry vertical. The requirement for revenue also rose this year, with vendors needing to have achieved at least $6 million in revenue, a higher bar to meet than the $4 million in revenue required last year.

Absent in this year’s market overview is the push made by Gartner last year for the cloud to become a part of portal vendor’s strategies. Last year’s report gave the call: “ ... the cloud is becoming an unavoidable part of the environment upon which portals must provide their services.”

Gartner noted in 2013 that many vendors were targeting business leaders, and this year Gartner seems to validate those efforts. Business leaders are becoming more influential as portal users and decision makers, the report notes.

An Exciting Time

Looking back on several years worth of Magic Quadrants, perhaps the most exciting thing about 2014 is the sheer breadth of vendors included in the report. In 2010, the portal market was represented by just ten vendors, at a time when we were still thinking the old way about portals: stagnant, contrived dashboards that became information graveyards. We’ve since realized that the internet has completely changed how we interact with each other, and portal technology is one very good way to help companies make customer experiences much more personal.

You can get the report to read for yourself here. We’d love to hear what you make of this year’s Gartner MQ for Horizontal Portals.

DISCLAIMER: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Liferay.com.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Paul Hinz forwarded us an old whitepaper and presentation from IBM back in 2009 that sought to debunk the "myth of free open source portals." The main idea was that open source portals might save you money on licensing but the savings would be outweighed by extra costs in development, upgrades and maintenance.

Just for fun I did a little research to see whether Liferay expertise is more expensive than, say, Websphere Portal knowledge. And it turns out that it is! ... by about 5%, according to Indeed.com:

Of course, that extra $6,000 per head could add up. But that 5% is probably statistically insignificant given the fluctuations of these salaries over time:

It's definitely good to see that on the whole, Liferay knowledge is increasingly valuable in the marketplace as more companies realize they can achieve greater business agility and better solutions using the Liferay platform. For our community, that's a confirmation that the investment you're making in open source will be rewarded financially.

But hopefully the motivation for working with Liferay goes beyond the numbers. The very popular TED talk by Dan Pinkabout motivation listed three main factors leading to better performance and satisfaction:

Autonomy

Mastery

Purpose

While I'm sure you can find these working with any technology, I think Liferay and open source are uniquely suited to maximize them:

Autonomy: the freedom of open source gives you a lot of control over the technology you use. You can modify the code and make contributions that affect the direction of the software. Proprietary vendors don't give you the same degree of flexibility.

Mastery: technology that's open can be explored in greater depth than closed technology. Mastery of closed technologies is limited to the use of it; with open source, you can truly understand the software inside and out. This is not to say that you have to do this to effectively use open source software, only that the option is there.

Purpose: the mutually beneficial nature of open source is further motivation for people who work with it. They sense that there's a greater purpose to the investment being made in the software than just an employer's business goals or the profit of the vendor. And with Liferay in particular, we have the added dimension of our vision to use business and technology to make a positive impact on the world.

Getting back to the main question, though: are "free open source portals" a myth? Definitely! Technology is never free even if the license cost is free. An investment in Liferay is an investment of resources, including time, development budget, and blood sweat and tears. We would be among the first to agree that open source != free: we've built a business around it.

However, I would argue that open source software results in a more efficient application of resources overall than proprietary software:

License budget is freed up for customization or integration

Development and innovation are shared and re-used

Improvements are made more quickly in a community of users

Bugs and security issues are discovered more quickly when source is accessible

Developer resources over time are more abundant because access to the technology is freely available, thereby driving costs down to a healthy market equilibrium

Further, Liferay is particularly effective in delivering greater return on assets because we are so widely deployable:

Existing investments in content management systems, ERPs, databases, OSes, and application servers can be retained; Liferay runs on all major platforms and integrates well with third party applications

All the attendant expertise around these technologies are retained as well

What about the allegations that open source costs more to deploy, customize, upgrade and maintain? Here's where the presenters do a little voodoo. By speaking generally about all open source, they are able to call to mind the weaknesses of community supported, non-commercial open source (think Apache projects, for example) and associate them mentally with commercial open source, which is managed, focused, offers specific support SLAs, and has recommended best practices for maintainability.

If you have a random developer without Liferay knowledge go in and hack up Liferay code and produce a customized solution, you will definitely have problems with upgrades and maintenance. Proprietary vendors prevent this a priori by disallowing access to the source code. But rather than taking that restrictive approach, Liferay supports customization architecturally with our Plug-Ins SDK and through best practices, which can be followed by any developer.

So the risk with open source is not that it inherently takes longer or is more expensive to deploy, but that the power granted to the developer will be used incorrectly. It's a problem of due diligence: open source requires you to do a little more homework when choosing your developers or system integrators.

In any case, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but perhaps this can be some ammunition for you when you are trying to convince your boss why they shouldn't believe IBM's FUD. :)

June 15th was our first-ever Liferay France Symposium held in Paris. We had a healthy turnout of over 100 community members, customers, and partners, who came together to learn about what's new in Liferay 6.1, hear customer case studies, and get connected with each other.

We wanted to make the event especially relevant for our local community, so two of our leading engineers, Ray Augé and Juan Fernandez, gave their presentations in French. We also had great case studies from Barclay's and the French Ministry of Defense, who are both using Liferay for partner portals with further plans to expand their usage for other applications. Apologies to those of you who didn't understand the presentations! Our EU Symposium in Frankfurt in October will have all content in English. :)

Liferay-based partner portals from Barclay's France and the French Ministry of Defense.

We met a lot of great people, including a couple of members from our Community Advisory Board, Boubker Tagnaouti and Yousri Bendiabdallah. I also got to catch up with our partners and customers. We had many interesting conversations about how switching from Websphere or other proprietary portals was challenging (due to conservative corporate environments) but ultimately generated dramatic increases in productivity and reductions in operating costs. Many of our customers have advocated for Liferay against the odds and have been proven wise in their decision.

One of the networking breaks at the event.

People were also very excited to hear about our upcoming Marketplace, which will give them a place to showcase the plug-ins and extensions they're already built for the Liferay platform. After a full day of sessions, we closed the event with a casual mixer along the Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Special thanks to our partner sponsors of the event: Altendis, Alyotech, GFI, Ippon, Smile, and SQLi! And if you want more in-depth coverage of the content (in French), check out these blogs from one of the attendees:

I am happy to announce that Liferay.com is now running on Liferay Portal 6 EE. The re-fresh is a minor one with respect to content but a major infrastructural upgrade that will pave the way for future enhancements to the site, including leveraging workflow for our web publishing and community interaction, and the introduction of social equity for our community participation.

As for the changes you can see, here is a summary:

Liferay Projects Pages​With all the open source projects we've incubated in the company over the last couple of years, we decided it was finally time to give them a home. Liferay's new Projects Pages puts faces to the names behind these efforts and will be the best place to look for new information and updates. Check it out!

Updated Community Pages Also as part of our project page refresh, we've re-organized the forums to have a top-level category for each project. These will break down further by language as each project grows. Of course, Portal is still the heavyweight here. :)

​New Events Pages With the rapid growth of our community and partner network, Liferay is the topic of conversation in a growing number of places! We re-designed the events pages to make it easier than ever to meet in person with other Liferay enthusiasts. Now we have a single events list that shows all upcoming events regardless of type in a single view. We also made it easier to filter the list with several different parameters including geography.

Mobile Device Friendly Layouts The update with the biggest WOW factor has to be the new layouts that adjust to the detected width of your browser. Liferay wants its site to be accessible by people on the go, but we didn't want to have to invest too heavily in a single platform's proprietary aspects since there are so many great ones out there to support. So we took a standards-based approach, and using just HTML5 and CSS, re-designed the site so that each device's browsable area will be accommodated. Here are three different views for desktop, tablet, and smartphone:

Desktop view. This has all the content on the home page.

Tablet view (iPad portrait mode). The difference is subtle but the banner image has been resized and the entire right column of content (Gartner MQ, France Symposium Mini-Banner) has been removed.

Smartphone view (iPhone portrait mode). Navigation is now phone-friendly and the most essential information is shown first; graphics are reduced for bandwidth.

Of course you can try it yourself—just resize your browser window now and see what happens!

Revamped Customer Portal EE customers will notice a new layout for the Customer Portal home page. We got rid of the introductory fluff and provided links to the most often accessed content to make the whole site easier to navigate.

Miscellaneous: Pingbacks Pingbacks on blogs are now enabled, so when someone refers to your Liferay.com blog from the web, you should automatically get a comment on that entry (testing this out on Olaf's latest blog).

Miscellaneous: Updated HTML Editors The HTML Editors used in Liferay 6 should perform better and be easier to use than the previous versions.

Oui, Nous Mangeons Notre Nourriture Pour Chiens Yes, we eat our own dog food here at Liferay. :) But the reason we find it so tasty is because it meets so many of our business needs:

Rich Web content management capabilities. We serve hundreds of pages on Liferay.com and support multiple editors working in the same system. LIferay's integrated portal + WCM foundation makes this easy.

Multi-lingual support. We have community members around the world and do our best to support them in their language.

Collaboration and Community. Obviously Liferay's community is an important part of our business and we want to support interaction through Blogs, MBs, Wikis, Activity Tracking, Profiles, Relationships and meta-data (tagging, comments, ratings).

Multi-site Management. Liferay.com users can access our public website, employee portal, customer portal, and personal user profile all in one place. Our site administrators are thankful that they don't have to deal with several different deployments.

Personalization. Each user should have his own view of portal assets across various sites, from the website to their support entitlements and license key management.

Workflow and Customization. We also use Liferay for a lot of our marketing initiatives. We try to understand what kind of content people are looking for and help them get connected to the right collateral. We also follow up with people when there's new information available that might interest them.

Integration with Salesforce and Other Enterprise Systems. Of course a portal isn't a portal without some EAI thrown in and we have plenty of needs in that area.

Many of these areas saw vast improvements in Liferay 6 and we we will be taking advantage of them with this new launch. We hope you enjoy it too and definitely let us know if you come across any issues or have suggestions for further improvements!

I just got back from our first Liferay Roadshow in Amsterdam yesterday and gave a talk about how identity and interactions are changing due to paradigm shifts in technology and corporate culture. I'll post about that some other time, but I did talk to someone considering Liferay for a business application and they asked the inevitable "what's the future of Java?" question.

I told him that I don't think Oracle will sabotage Java because almost 100% of their business relies on it. Then I recalled an email I had in my inbox about James Gosling's keynote at the Server Side conference recently.

Mr. Gosling's way of expressing the sentiment: "No clue what Larry (Ellison) will do. But he won't shoot himself. I hope."

In the talk, he explained, "It's in their own self-interest to not be really aggressively stupid, but it's been clear that it's been something of a learning experience. It's been clear that they didn’t understand what they bought, what it meant to deal with communities and people and all the arguing and discussion and consensus building that’s involved in communities."

What I find most interesting about his comments is his acknowledgement of the nuances of an inclusive, eco-system-based business model, one that the machinery of the Oracle corporation isn't as suited to accommodate. Of course that to me is an indication of the divide between modern and post-modern approaches to business and the fundamental shifts going on (with Oracle one of the best representatives of the modern and Sun a failed attempt at the post-m) but there's no time to get into all that nonsense. :)

"Rather than boring your customers to death, there is a clear opportunity to put the dull corporate website to rest. Then resurrect it as a platform for true community engagement that functions as a hub for interaction with all customers and stakeholders."

Sounds good in theory, but how does it work in practice? But first, let's consider how we got here in the first place.

It's not surprising to hear social paradigms for web interaction being validated by an established publication like Forbes because we've been living in that reality for almost a decade now.

But it's easy to forget, when you're in the software industry and especially when your software is used in social applications, that not everyone has switched to this more human, more relational paradigm.

The focus on social these days among enterprise software vendors can be seen as a bit redundant because the internet was designed to be interactive from the beginning. The very nature of the web, with embeddable links taking you a thousand places and bringing you back again, was fundamentally different from any offline counterparts; here was something you couldn't do before you could do it "online." Add to that the fact that the internet has near-zero "publishing" costs (just edit some HTML or submit a form and hit "refresh") and that it's location independent (participants can be anywhere in the world) and you have the foundations for today's social experiences.

This was the closest thing we had to the internet before the internet.

When the internet first hit the mainstream back in the mid- to late-90s, existing paradigms for communication, publishing, and media were carried on to the web as is: people took their static company brochure online (these were even called "Brochure Sites"), or they would put what was essentially a mail order catalog on the web with electronic checkout, and they would yell at their audiences on virtual billboards with the same one size fits all advertising they used offline. If enterprise software is just now getting social, perhaps it's because until now we've been using the internet as just another thin client in what are essentially rehashes of client/server software.

eTide.com would have been funded with a $10M Series A back then.

But in the public, people quickly realized that the web was interesting because it allowed the audience to participate, and though at first we mimicked the first wave of activity (remember Geocities? we all made brochure sites of our lives), eventually we found our way into the interactive. We called this (perhaps briefly) Web 2.0, which was a catch-all for the interactive, consumer as producer/participant philosophy of the "new" web.

The vanguard of Web 2.0 were sites like Flickr and Wikipedia and YouTube. Social bookmarks (Delicious and Digg) were thrown in there, too. These sites provided a framework for Viewers Like You to contribute; in fact the Big 3 of the early social web experiences are notable for what they don't provide: any meaningful content of their own. YouTube and Flickr are structures in which people publish and interact with content, the consumption of which is just a portion of what they do, albeit still the most significant one.

Of course there are sites that added social elements to enhance or come alongside established paradigms. Amazon in particular successfully transformed the shopping experience in a way only made possibly by the Internet by adding active interaction and (perhaps dubiously) tracking passive user behavior.

I'd like what he's having, please.

I was recently shopping for headphones and started leaning toward the Grado GR80's because 15% of people who looked at the GR60's decided to shell out for the pricier model, whereas only 7% went the other. This is buying criteria you can't get at Best Buy. In fact, the closest thing Best Buy has to the Amazon experience is the salesperson telling you, "Ah, get this model—it's the one everyone gets, and I've got two at home," which smacks of sales pitch and leaves you with that sick feeling you get when you're being sold to. At the same time, your social instinct wants to go with the herd; the entire transaction leaves you feeling vulnerable either way.

By contrast, Amazon, with its behavior data, not only satisfies your need for peer approval but does it with precise metrics that leave no doubt in your mind about the choice you're about to make. You're no longer a hapless consumer without information; you're making a smart decision armed with both objective facts and social considerations. Amazon wins, not only on price, but increasingly on the shopping "experience."

99% of lemmings who approached this cliff jumped in the water.

It seems now the slightly geeky "Web 2.0" label has ceded to the more universal (and incidentally not copyrightable) label of "social," which also captures the essence of what we're talking about. The old paradigms were one way: producer to consumer, media to audience, seller to buyer. But no one who approaches relationships this way will ever get very far; being "social" necessitates the give and take of conversation, and it requires really "listening" above all else.

That's why I'm not sure what to think about those who use Twitter as another soapbox for company propaganda; Twitter was designed to be personal and real. We've tried to keep it that way here at Liferay, so much so that we realized the best way was for the company Twitter to re-Tweet individual Tweets from our team. Zappos' CEO has a fun Twitter feed that probably is a manifestation of his personal pre-occupation with the pursuit of happiness.

Tweetray: Complete with Web 2.0-ish bubbly icon.

Facebook Groups are the same way; I was amused to see a hotel I recently stayed at offer an entry in a drawing for people who "liked" them on Facebook. This is the anithesis of social media; people should "Like" your company because they are inherently enchanted by doing business with you, enjoy relating to your people, or savour the experiences they have with you. The contrived approach to generating Facebook Likes seems self-defeating and inauthentic; is it better to have big parties because you offer free food and drinks, or to have intimate gatherings where you know who your real friends are? Likewise, being "popular" on Facebook can just dilute the quality of your audience. It's easier to have a real, fruitful relationship with that core group of people who would have "Liked" you regardless of your giveaway.*

As a case in point, Southwest Airlines has 1.3 million Facebook Likes to American's 130,000 and United's 244,000; is that due to a more clever social marketing campaign or because people are genuinely enthusiastic for the company? I don't know, but I suspect SWA has a good amount of genuine goodwill mixed in there, simply because they've allowed themselves to have a personality as a company throughout the years.

"I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there."

So, back to the Forbes blog. I think the challenge for those of us who have been making their websites "platforms for true community engagement" for some time now is not making that decision to kill the old corporate website, but rather what I would call the inherent limitations of internet-based social interactions.

In real life, we only have a limited amount of energy and time with which to interact with people. We signal these limits in many ways that can't be replicated online: we use physical distance, either by standing aloof from others at a party or by getting out of sight completely (staying home, for instance); we use non-verbal cues like facial expressions and the way we stand to express interest or dis-interest; we lessen the sting of moving on to a new conversation with a light tap on the shoulder or a squeeze of the arm and an apologetic smile.

On the internet, we have both more and less control of social interactions. We can choose to ignore our Facebook notifications or pretend to go "Offline," but the transactional nature of web communication creates expectations that eventually, each social request deserves a response.

Unlike in the offline world, social interactions can be cued up indefinitely; you don't need to finesse your way into a conversation, and you can't gracefully avoid them. We have a greater chance of being "accosted" in the online social world. We can't mete out our attention to the most deserving among our peers; everyone has equal access to first.last@company.com or @username. We've developed elaborate ways to try to make up for these limitations by adding depth to the very shallow relational designations of the online world, but it's taxing to re-create what in real life occurs naturally and intrinsically.

Likewise, for a company, the question is not whether to "go social"; it's how not to get burnt out by the flood of people wanting to be your "friends." Companies need to focus their collective resources strategically and make sure they rise above the "small talk" to the conversations of real substance. Online social interactions require less investment of time and energy; people can easily fire off an email or post to a forum. Companies need to quantify how invested these people are in your company, their level of interest in your products or services, and their readiness to engage in a significant relationship (one that's monetizable, as crude as that sounds). It doesn't have to result in dollars, especially in open source, but you want to spend your time on the people that are going to bring value to the company eco-system over time—through constructive feedback, identifying marketing needs, product testing, building awareness, and so on.

How to do that most effectively is one of the key challenges of "socializing" your organization.

-----

*Liferay itself has considered offering training discounts to people who Like our Facebook. I think in principle it misses the point of social media, but we're all grappling with what to do with Facebook, aren't we?

Liferay had the chance to be a platinum sponsor at the Open Source Conference 2010, organized by Red Hat and Accenture. At almost 450 attendees, it was the Benelux region's largest-ever OSS focused conference. When I asked for a show of hands, most folks in the audience said they felt more comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt, so I'm assuming that we had a strong showing of technical folks.

OSC2010 was held at the amazing Muziekgebouw, part of an urban redevelopment effort completed in 2004 that has helped restore this riverfront area to its historical vitality and importance to civic life.

The general sense we got (and this was confirmed by others) was that open source awareness and understanding in the Netherlands is behind that in France and Germany. Many of the sessions seemed to cover topics and ideas that are now well known even for those not actively using open source: open source provides more agility, the chance to evaluate software without upfront investment, control over one's IT initiatives, better value for the cost, more secure software of higher quality than proprietary offerings.

Liferay was a platinum sponsor at the event, giving us a great booth on the mezzanine with a view of the river and the main train station near the historic center.

Tomas Nyström, an Accenture Senior Director heading up their open source practice, notably presented some new research findings from an open source survey they conducted earlier this year. The largest trends are that the driver for open source adoption is no longer primarily cost savings; respondents are turning to open source because OSS provider higher quality and more reliable software that better meets their needs and gets their solutions to market more quickly. You can find related research here and here.

New research from Accenture shows varying motivations for using open source—not primarily cost.

I also had a chance to deliver one of the plenary sessions and shared about the innovator's dilemma for new software companies. I'll expound on this later, but the basic idea is that often companies that want to compete with the established vendors do so by taking investment capital, only to find themselves being acquired by those very vendors. So innovation seems to have a life span of 5-7 years at most growing software companies. By contrast, at Liferay, we've built the company without taking outside investment and this allows us to make decisions that strike the right balance between keeping our company healthy, satisfying our customers, and creating value for the community. This is a huge advantage for people who decide to invest their time, resources, and energy into Liferay technology, because they know we're going to be around for the long haul.

Acquisition is unfortunately the fate for a lot of innovative software companies.

I also shared my slot with one of our customers, the Open University of the Netherlands. My co-speaker, Eric Kluijfhout, has over ten years of experience bringing his ICT experience to bear on educational institutions and their initiatives around collaborative learning and online course delivery. Eric and has team have been using Liferay at Open University for the last several years, where it has served as an application platform, enabling OU to rapidly prototype solutions and deliver results for various initiatives around collaborative education. Their Liferay-based application have provided a solution for 14 EU partners in 9 different countries and is being extended to new initiatives in the region.

All in all it was a successful conference and we were able to hang out with some of our existing customers and some new prospects. We got some positive feedback on Twitter which I'm including here. (I hope it's not too self-congratulatory!)

As some of you may know, Liferay decided earlier this year to make a strategic investment in growing the European market. To that end, Joseph Shum, our former Alliance Manager for North America, and myself have been traveling frequently to our offices in Frankfurt over the last six months.

Liferay's first Italy Symposium. The venue was an old church converted into a university lecture hall.

It's been a whirlwind for us, signing up new partners, meeting new customers, and organizing events throughout the EU.

Here's a round up of some of the highlights from Europe:

In April we moved to our new offices in Eschborn, next to the Deutsche Börse (German Stock Exchange), Deutsche Bank, Vodafone, British Telecom and others. And we're hiring!

In October we held our third annual Liferay European Symposium in Frankfurt. We had nine partner sponsors, over 300 attendees, and a full two-day, two-track program with participation from the Liferay team worldwide.

We held our first Liferay Italy Symposium Nov 12 near Venice, with over 150 sign ups and participation from several Liferay customers in Italy. Many universities in Italy are invested in Liferay as well as recognized brands like Benetton and Danone.

We held our first Liferay Workshop in London in July 2010. The half day session brought over 50 participants, including Marcin Kierdelowicz, our new Alliance Manager for the UK. We also hired Ruth Coca, also based in London, as a Consultant.

Our Hungarian and Spanish offices continue to grow. More office space, new furniture, and new engineers means better products for our eco-system and better support for our EE subscribers.

We are seeing enormous traction for Liferay in this market, including manufacturing, financial services, insurance, education, and public administration.

Liferay participated in the Open Source Conference in Amsterdam last week. Over 450 people in attendance learned about Liferay's commitment to open source and the advantages of being investor-free.

Liferay participated as a Gold Sponsor at the JAX Conference in Mainz, where I was able to share in my keynote about the history of Liferay as a company and some of the lessons we've learned buidling a commercial open source company.

Of course during that same time we held several other conferences worldwide, including our East Coast Symposium in Reston near DC in June and our West Coast Symposium in Anaheim in September. We also had our first Tokyo Seminar in July.

This year's European Symposium drew over 300 attendees!

Meanwhile, Paul Hinz, our CMO, and our marketing and sales teams have been hitting the road with our Liferay Road Show series, giving our community the opportunity to meet Liferay face to face throughout the US. We'll be holding these events throughout the year in 2011 and extending them to the EU as well.

And if you just can't make it out to one of these events, you can always join Liferay for our Liferay LIVE events online!

It's been an incredibly busy first half of 2010 and I haven't had as much time to blog as I'd like to. With new offices in Budapest and Brazil, rapid sales growth and rapid product releases, there's always too much to do and not enough time to communicate!

When you're always in the midst of all things Liferay you don't realize that the perception from the outside is not always clear. For example, earlier this year, with the final approval of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, some people were misinformed about the future of Liferay because they were under the impression that Liferay had been acquired by Sun or had been dependent on Sun for its product development.

So for the record, I would like to state simply that Liferay was not part of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. Liferay has always been and continues to be an independent company, completely self-funded and privately owned. In our prior partnership with Sun, Sun basically had an agreement to use Liferay Portal for the re-branded WebSpace server, but Liferay was never dependent in any way on Sun for engineering or product development.

Liferay's relationship to the Sun acquisition.

This is important for our community and customers to understand, of course, as you all continue to invest in the Liferay platform. You want to know that your investment is going to be secure for many years to come, and you can rest assured that that is the case. Liferay is now the only major independent portal vendor on the market (all the others are part of a big vendor's stack agenda), and we are one of the most compelling enterprise platforms for building applications around social collaboration, content management and enterprise portal technologies.

It's also important to us because we continue to be very committed to our vision to make an impact in the world through business and technology. Liferay Foundation, a non-profit organization that is at the center of this effort, is funded primarily by taking a portion of the profits from Liferay, Inc. Using money for charitable contributions and innovative technology to help developing countries is not exactly top of mind for the Oracle shareholders. :)

That said, we are happy to continue to work with any company out there that wants to innovate new technologies and business models around open source software, and of course Liferay is committed to its compatibility with Oracle's suite of database and middleware solutions.

So, what to do if you're a customer that was using Sun's WebSpace server, WebSynergy, or are confused about which Oracle product to use? Give us a call or contact us to learn more about Liferay and what we can do for you.

I would like to announce that starting with version 6, Liferay Portal will be made available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) v2.1.

The short history of commercial open source software vendors is littered with examples of vendors promising why these license changes made time-to-time are of benefit to the so-called “community” whereas the real motive is often to accommodate the vendor’s shifting monetization strategy. It would be reasonable then for you, the Liferay community, to be skeptical, were we to go down that familiar path of trying to justify something which may or may not really be for the community’s benefit.

So instead, let me explain what the different pros and cons are of the MIT and LGPL licenses, why the LGPL will benefit both Liferay and its community members, and where the license change fits in Liferay’s larger strategy to enable our community to build better business solutions that benefit end users using Liferay Portal.

The MIT (X11) License

Liferay has now been available under the MIT license for ten years. That’s an impressive history and we have a fondness for this license for its simplicity and its bold permissiveness. Brian Chan first chose the license because of the prestige of its namesake (though I argue we should have chosen the BSD instead for that reason!) and because it added the lowest number or words to the source. :)

Over the years we’ve enjoyed the benefits of the MIT license:

It’s a permissive license that unlike the Apache (1.2) license is compatible with the GPL (v2 and 3)

It completely mitigates any risk for prospective adopters of the software

Anyone can do anything with MIT-licensed software, creating a proliferation of the technology and a wide footprint for that software. People are wiling to invest heavily in innovating around MIT-licensed software

Ultimately, our comfort with the MIT license lay in our confidence that in open source it’s not the IP that matters as much as the experts behind that IP, and this continues to be the case today. No one can innovate around user experience, portal, and collaborative technologies in Liferay as well as Liferay, Inc., can, and the community has always returned to the source for the latest in Liferay technology.

The Trust-based Model Has Drawbacks

At Liferay we also have a certain optimism about open source and those who believe in the open source philosophy. We believe that by extending the most freedom to Liferay users, they will extend their best to us and contribute to an ever richer platform with more and more capabilities.

On the whole, the ubiquitous adoption of the Liferay platform is good for the community because it gives Liferay credibility. The Liferay you are an expert in is the same Liferay chosen by so many high-profile technology vendors (including Novell and Sun) to be a very important part of their technology portfolio. We’ve definitely benefited from that publicity.

The downside of the permissive MIT license was that some companies (usually looking to sell a proprietary product) would redistribute Liferay without any monetary compensation to Liferay the company and without any contribution of features, fixes, or enhancements to the wider Liferay community. So not only are these vendors not giving to Liferay and its community, they are forcing others to pay them for a product that is 90% Liferay. If you are a community member, this is irksome because you’ve invested in that 90% that they are using without compensation. If you are Liferay, Inc., you suffer the double injustice of not counting the vendor as a customer AND possibly losing some other customers to this vendor.

Licenses and Business Models

To a degree, Liferay was comfortable with the tradeoff of permissiveness for the occasional lost prospect who decided to go it alone, but there were other side effects that would not fit with the future direction of the company. EE has been doing very well since its introduction last year, but we’ve known for some time that we want to expand Liferay’s impact in the software industry by accelerating its adoption as an enterprise application platform.

Several of the things needed for Liferay to be an effective platform are already in place:

Ubiquity and compatibility across a breadth of infrastructure and technologies. This has been one of our core strengths since Liferay’s inception; vendor neutrality and technology independence are hallmarks of the Liferay brand.

A plug-in architecture that can accommodate extensions and modifications. Liferay’s plug-in architecture has been evolving rapidly in the last two years and is now powerful enough to accommodate any customization or extension that might traditionally accomplished through direct modification of the code.

A developer community. Liferay’s open source community has always been strong, and we’ve used Liferay’s own social networking capabilities to create a home for our developers on Liferay.com. We will continue to improve the Liferay.com community sub-site so they can truly collaborate, learn, develop their profile, and share their work.

Improved tooling and APIs to empower developers. Liferay’s collaboration with Sun yielded the very helpful Portal Pack for NetBeans, and Liferay recently hired Greg Amerson, lead developer from MyEclipse, to build further tooling for the Liferay platform. We are also investing heavily in our new Alloy UI framework, which will greatly simplify the user experience portions of web and enterprise application development.

The last piece of the puzzle to bring this all together is a marketplace where the Liferay community and Liferay solution partners can market and sell their solutions to the Liferay eco-system, and the inception of the marketplace is one of our top goals for 2010. As we thought about the requirements for this marketplace in 2009, we saw an interesting drama playing out in the mobile market between Google’s Android and the Apple iPhone. Google had chosen a permissive Apache license for their OS, which led to a fractured market and constrained Google’s ability to foster a healthy marketplace for Android applications. Apple, by contrast, had retained tight control over the iPhone and the App Store and, combined with a healthy lead in the space, dominated with more than 100,000 apps to Android’s 20,000.

We realized that something similar was happening to Liferay. People were definitely building solutions (applications) “for" Liferay, but they were doing it in a way that would fracture the install base. Rather than building solutions compatible with a single common platform by properly isolating new code in a pluggable and segregated form, vendors were taking Liferay and modifying it directly to create slightly different products. Left unchecked, this had potential of becoming even more of a liability to Liferay than lost revenue, because a fractured install base would constrain the value and potential of the marketplace of complementary offerings. With the MIT license, we were in essence trading the “true” ubiquity of a tightly controlled core platform for a “false” ubiquity with many variants.

If Liferay were serious about engendering a marketplace of complementary monetizable products for a single consistent platform, we would have to consider a different license.

The LGPL

Liferay believes that the LGPL will provide the best benefits of the MIT license and the best protection against MIT’s limitations without any legitimate detriment to the community. It will secure the consistency of the core Liferay platform and broaden the reach of that single platform so that Liferay and its community members can build and monetize solutions for that platform.

The change from MIT to LGPL will alienate that small set of users that wish to be able to freely modify Liferay’s core and re-distribute without making any contribution (financial or source code) back to Liferay, Inc. and its community. And this is by design, for it is precisely these folks who might fracture Liferay’s install base and constrain our marketplace potential.

Every other constituency of the Liferay community will see even more benefits with the new license. The LGPL will refine the Liferay community to those who are willing to participate in the creation of a common stable platform for the benefit of all. Those on the fringes who would only use Liferay to their own benefit will be excluded, but some of those who would not otherwise have done so will now decide to make contributions. Most importantly, the addressable market for Liferay plugins and solutions will grow in size and value because of the single common platform enforced by use of the LGPL.

With the LGPL, Liferay will also be freer than ever to err on the side of being generous with the core platform’s capabilities, knowing that our efforts and the community’s are protected and that our indirect monetization opportunities are growing with the widening adoption of Liferay.

Continued Freedom to Innovate

It is important to point out that the terms of the LGPL allow users to modify LGPL-licensed software for their own internal use without redistribution. But even if this were not the case, the major architectural advancements Liferay has made over the last 18 months would still give our community maximum freedom without obligation to use Liferay Portal CE to build solutions based off the LGPL-licensed core. The powerful hooks mechanism introduced last year can be used to modify Liferay behavior without modifying the core. In fact, even Liferay’s EXT environment, which allows modification of the behavior of Liferay’s kernel, services, and UI, is now deployable as a plug-in, which in LGPL terms (as long as you follow best practices) will be considered a linked piece of software and therefore not subject to the reciprocity rules of the LGPL.

It is regrettable that in the past some chose to take Liferay and “hack" the source without contributing back, but some of them did so at a time when hooks and plug-ins were not mature yet as a technology. But with the new architectural developments there should now be no reason not to choose to invest in a common core (and improve it with contributions), even as people build strikingly different solutions. This will be a matter of architectural and community best practices, and the LGPL complements these practices well.

The Liferay Platform: A Marketplace of Solutions

As we continue to strengthen the quality and capability of the Liferay Portal core we are calling our community to the vision we put forth in 2009 at our global Symposia: let’s build effective business solutions that solve real problems for end users, and let’s make them available to all through open source and commercial models to create maximum value for all. Liferay has built a strong and valuable platform with the services and capabilities you need—portals, content (management and aggregation), collaboration, workflow, reporting, social networking, and a user experience framework are just a few of those. Our community will use that platform to create the next-generation of web-based enterprise applications that they can bring to a broader audience facilitated by the Liferay marketplace.

We are very excited about this change and look forward to journeying with you all for another 10 years building great open source software together. If any of you have any concerns or questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

According to the H, Oracle has quietly discontinued OpenSSO Express, the community version of OpenSSO previously made available by Sun. It'd be sensationalistic to make any wide-sweeping generalizations about Oracle's approach to open source from a single incident, but one thing clearly illustrated is that open source software uniquely mitigates risks for its users. Had OpenSSO been proprietary software, the acquisition of Sun could have left OpenSSO completely inaccessible forever, destroying the value of any investment made into the technology. But with access to the source, a new organization (ForgeRock in this case) can come in and continue where Sun left off.

Good luck to Lasse and the ForgeRock team and kudos for delivering on the promise of open source.

Hello to everyone in the Liferay community and a belated Happy New Year. I trust January has been filled with new opportunities and renewed energy for all of us after the holiday break.

I've gotten in the habit of writing an annual year-in-review entry but am a little behind on 2009. So many good things are happening here at Liferay that it's hard to keep up! We recently put out a press release highlighting our successes in 2009:

80% Growth in number of customers

Over 50% revenue growth

3 million+ downloads

More than 60 partners worldwide

These are all exciting figures but they only tell part of the story. 2009 was a significant year for Liferay Inc. in many other ways. First, 2009 was a year where we all felt a lot of concern about the economy and what the recession might mean for our business. By the end of first quarter of 2009 we were at least six months in to the crisis, but we had no visible signs of being affected. Business was up and people were responding well to our new Enterprise Edition. But our management team always strives to be fiscally prudent and to proactively manage spending, burn, and cash flow. So around March 2009 we wondered whether we needed to take any drastic measures in anticipation of a possible downturn in business.

We found blogs citing the kind of advice premier VCs like Benchmark and Sequoia had been giving their portfolio companies since October 2008:

We considered the Zappos model for conserving capital.

Conserve capital

Extend your runway

Don't expect to be able to depend on getting additional rounds of financing

Get profitable as quickly as possible

Minimize expenses like real estate (don't expand until you're literally sitting on top of each other)

Upon reflection, though, the truth was we had already been running our business this way for the past five years:

Liferay has been a profitable company since inception

We've always conserved capital and minimized expenses to ensure we had enough cash to stay in business. We used a "just-in-time" hiring model in the early years and made sure we had enough revenue to pay for our people

We started out and continue to be self-funded and independent from investors that might force us to take decisions that aren't always best for our customers, the community, or our employees

We found a very affordable real estate solution that continues to serve us well to this day. When the office got crowded, rather than reducing people we shrunk our desks by 33% and increased capacity by 40%

We were quite humbled to think that as young entrepreneurs we had taken all the same steps that top tier investors with years of experience were recommending.

Enterprise Edition: Exceeding our Goals

2009 was also significant as the first year we offered to the market a commercial version of our flagship product, Liferay Portal. We had seen several other open source vendors execute on similar models and it seemed to bring many benefits to all parties, but how would our community respond to this move?

Very well, in fact; the Liferay community wholeheartedly embraced Enterprise Edition:

They were happy to have a sustaining tail of older versions with a guaranteed four-year maintenance period and five-year End of Service Life Policy

They could now go to decision makers and show that adopting Liferay Portal in the enterprise would provide tremendous benefits in innovation, capability, and flexibility, without sacrificing stability or reliability

They wanted to see Liferay, Inc. continue to grow in its commercial success so we could continue to provide great free software to the community

Our service partners could now help Liferay grow subscription revenue through EE sales and benefit from additional services revenue passed on to them

We have since released two EE versions of Liferay Portal and our organizations is tuned for this new model.

A Mature and Agile Organization

I was particularly delighted in 2009 to see how quickly our team here at Liferay executed on evolving the organization toward a subscription-based company with a dual-license model providing regular software updates and support. We set a goal in January of last year to build the machinery needed to drive sales of and support EE, grow a partner network to deliver solutions based on EE, and make the engineering investments in support, QA, performance testing, and environment testing to make EE a success, and by all counts we exceeded those goals. I am very proud to work with a team of talented, dedicated, and genuinely wonderful people here at Liferay.

Ongoing Recognition

Our efforts have not gone unnoticed:

Gartner recognized Liferay as the leading visionary in their Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal products in 2008 and 2009

Liferay also placed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software, 2008, and Social Software in the Workplace, 2009

SesameStreet.com, a rich media website built using Liferay's web content management system, won an Emmy award for New Approaches in Daytime Children's, recognizing Sesame's innovative use of Liferay's web capabilities.

More importantly, our customers continue to share about the empowerment Liferay provides them in their enterprises, the innovative solutions they are building, and the tremendous benefits end users are experiencing with our software.

Other Highlights

Other memorable moments in 2009:

Our management and engineering team traveled the globe in 2009 to meet with nearly 1000 of our community members, customers, and partners at four separate Symposium meetings in Reston (Washington DC), Anaheim (Los Angeles), Offenbach (Frankfurt) and Bangalore.

Paul Hinz, former head of Java EE and the Glassfish family of products, joined Liferay as our new Chief Marketing Officer. Paul successfully grew the Glassfish community (18 million downloads!) and drove the Glassfish Portfolio offering that included WebSpace, Sun's offering built on Liferay Portal. Paul was also the champion for Liferay and Sun's innovative open source community relationship.

Continued software and technology innovation at Liferay resulted in the release of Liferay Social Office 1.5 beta and ongoing work on Liferay Alloy UI, a new all-encompassing front-end framework based on YUI v3 that simplifies rich application development across HTML, CSS, and Javascript concerns.

Introducing Liferay Foundation

I'll close by talking a little bit about Liferay Foundation. Those who have been part of the Liferay community for some time are probably aware that Liferay, Inc., has actively been involved over the years in supporting organizations that are helping in disaster situations or providing more long-term development aid in developing countries. To further maximize our impact, we formed the Liferay Foundation in 2009 as an organization dedicated to discovering the unique ways we can meet the needs we encounter in the world. Most recently, Liferay Foundation offered a matching donation to our community of up to $15,000 for those supporting the relief effort in Haiti. Longer term, we want to invest in efforts that are sustainable and empowering to make a long-term difference in addition to the one-time donations we have made in response to disasters. You'll hear a lot more about Liferay Foundation in the coming months, and you can certainly talk to us if you are interested in learning more.

What's next?

There's a lot more in store for Liferay in 2010 and I'll look forward to sharing more with you in an upcoming blog! Until then, thank you to everyone who has contributed to making Liferay even stronger in 2009!

Robert Schware from the Global Learning Portal recently shared with us about a study tour of three different educational organizations to see how the Madrid School System's portal software has made an impact on their educational community and what organizations can do to embrace more open source. Here's a quick summary:

"In partnership with USAID and AMIDEAST, the Global Learning Portal recently organized a Study Tour for Palestinian education stakeholders to Madrid, Spain to examine the role the EducaMadrid portal is playing in the education system there. Established by the Consejería de Educación de la Communidad de Madrid, and based on the same Liferay enterprise portal solution GLP uses, the EducaMadrid portal has been integrated into the education system for school and community outreach, professional development, and school physical capacity building within a public-private framework. It has been supported operationally by the Groupo Gesfor."

The EducaMadrid Learning Portal based on Liferay tailors its look and feel to the grade level of the student.

GLP uses Liferay for its core learning portal offering, serving multi-tenant and single-tenant, hosted and locally deployed solutions to organizations in Afghanistan, Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, South America and elsewhere.

Another great example of the innovation that the Liferay community keeps contributing is the recently released Liferay Linked Data Module from IMC Technologies. Linked Data is an approach that lets you both publish and access data in a way that is semantically specified according to standard models, interoperable, cross-referenceable and remotely queryable. This way, you can not only tap on resources available on the web of data, such as DBpedia, but also make your own content available (and thus reusable and cross-referenceable). This makes for mashups that operate directly on the data level, removing the need for different proprietary APIs.

IMC calls this the Linked Data inbound/outbound approach, and here you can see a screenshot of a sample application developed to showcase the inbound approach, in which tag meanings are disambiguated by using DBpedia.

The folks at Integrated Semantics have developed a Flex/AIR-based front-end for Liferay Portal. This is a great example of Liferay's flexibility when it comes to separating the presentation tier from the back-end services, standards implementations, APIs, and authentication / authorization capabilities. Gartner's portal decomposition ideas are at play here (portal server providing services to both portal and non-portal applications enterprise-wide), and we're also proud to see the strength of innovation going on in the Liferay community.